Farm & Food File
A syndicated column by Alan Guebert
Life on the Farm
Gun closets across America
Posted on August 3, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, July 21, 2024
Like most southern Illinois farms of my youth, my family had a closet filled with guns.
It was just inside the living room and it held my father’s 12-gauge Marlin shotgun, his .22 caliber Remington pump rifle, brother Richard’s single-shot 20-gauge shotgun, brother David’s single-shot 410-shotgun, and my single-shot .22 […]
‘Overalls, two shoes, and a belt’
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, June 9, 2024
The clothes we wore, like the crops we worked, marked the seasons on the dairy farm of my youth. Coveralls, for example, suggested winter while (ahem) “cover little” meant the hot, steamy southern Illinois summer.
That was especially so for my brothers and me. If we were relegated to kitchen […]
The outrage over White Rural Rage
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, May 12, 2024
Early in my first year at the Big U, a new friend from Chicago’s south side asked me what he thought was an innocent question. “You’re from southern Illinois,” began Vince, “so why don’t you talk like a hillbilly?”
Like a what? I asked.
“You know,” he explained, “why don’t […]
Another $1 billion to refinance status quo won’t stop avian pandemics
Posted on August 2, 2024
Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, April 7, 2024
When word came out of Texas on April 1 that avian flu had made another unwelcome hop–this one from a dairy cow to a human–the news seemed like an April Fool’s joke.
It wasn’t. In fact, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI or bird flu), the quick-killing […]
‘Right to Repair’ Fight Between Farmers and Machinery Giants is Just Getting Started
Posted on April 10, 2023
Before a January “memorandum of understanding,” or MOU, on a farmer’s “right to repair” his farm machinery, U.S. equipment makers and their farm and ranch customers were locked in a legal and legislative fight over who could fix today’s complex ag machinery–the customer who owned or leased it, or the maker that designed, built, and […]
Paying the Price for Being Sick, Old, or Poor in Rural America
Posted on April 10, 2023
Rural America is just like the rest of America except it’s older, poorer, and often sicker.
Even worse, if you’re all three in rural America–elderly, poor, and ill–the odds that you will receive proper care from either a government agency or a private provider are dwindling with each passing year.
For proof, here’s how the non-profit National […]
Didn’t Everyone ‘Fall’ Plow in Mild, Warm February?
Posted on March 3, 2023
Winter’s icy winds, stinging snow, and below-zero temperatures finally found our slice of the upper Midwest late last month. Unlike northern winters of the past, however, this Arctic blast was a quick slap of shattering cold followed by a warm, 40-degree hug of sunshine to melt its accompanying snow and icy heart.
A fast, almost 50-degree-turnaround […]
Howard’s Priceless Gift of Simple Giving
Posted on January 6, 2023
The Christmas tree was a scrub cedar hacked from the edge of the woods that bordered the farm.
Big-bulbed lights, strung in barber pole fashion, generated almost as much heat as the nearby woodstove. Yellowed Christmas cards, saved through the years and perched like doves in the untrimmed branches, served as ornaments.
“I believe this is the […]
Life on the Mississippi
Posted on December 13, 2022
As widespread rains begin to slowly refill lakes, reservoirs, and rivers, Thanksgiving thoughts turn back to the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth where the Mississippi River, just a mile from our dairy barn, was a constant, often dominating presence.
Except, that is, in the late summer months when everything around the farm–cows, hired men, […]
Every Day was Labor Day–Including Labor Day
Posted on September 28, 2022
One certain way to raise my agricultural bona fides among farming friends was to casually mention my upbringing on a 100-cow, southern Illinois dairy farm.
“Oh,” they would say reverently, “that’s real work.”
Yes, it was, but mostly for my father who began his farming career milking cows by hand in 1950 and ended it in 1989 […]